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Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Thursday, October 06, 2011

Another few interesting links to share today to reduce the number of open tabs I have.

This site is one I was told about in a comment a week or so back; it has speeches from the Brazilian president with matching audio.

Two days ago Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society wrote about the Division of Planetary Sciences / European Planetary Science Congress in Nantes (France), where the Dawn team went over what they have learned about Vesta so far. Dawn has just started its new orbit (HMO, high mapping orbit) and so we are just beginning to see the surface at about eight times the detail we saw it at before. She mentions how inconclusive they are about Vesta's surface features and how they were created, because we still really have no idea. After HMO will come one more orbit, again about four times closer than the last.

This article was a bit of sad news to me, but you'd never know it from the article itself. Remember the three missions the ESA was looking at, out of which only two were to be chosen? Well, the one I really wanted to see get approval was not chosen. The two they chose were a solar probe and a telescope to map galaxies and learn about dark matter, but the planet-hunting PLATO was the one that didn't get selected. Read about the mission that didn't get selected here. As I often mention, the only way we are going to completely change our view of the universe is by discovering other worlds like ours, and the more the better.

Finally an article here about a book in Afrikaans that has sold over 27,000 copies in two weeks.